


I'll wear you like a familiar scar

by leiascully



Series: There Will Be Other Dances [13]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Afterlife, Episode Fix-it: s04e08 Silence in the Library, F/M, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-29
Updated: 2011-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-29 07:34:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/317345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River gave up waiting for the Doctor, but she still has stories to tell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll wear you like a familiar scar

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-"Silence in the Library" with possible spoilers for all aired eps  
> Concrit: Welcome  
> A/N: Title is from the Harrod & Funk song "Guessing Game" on my River/11 playlist (which I'll upload one of these days). Dedicated to [**gidget_zb**](http://gidget-zb.livejournal.com/), whom I'm sure was tired of waiting. For the scars square on my [**kink_bingo**](http://kink-bingo.dreamwidth.org/) card.  
>  Disclaimer: _Doctor Who_ and all related characters are the property of Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat, and BBC. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

River knows each time a new person is uploaded to the Library. She long ago gave up waiting for him. She took up gardening instead: it soothes her to sift through the soil and make it smooth for her plants. It soothes her to tend to things that are rooted in their time and place. She's tending her roses when she senses the ripple in the space-time of the Library that means another soul has been literally saved, and she just goes on pruning and clipping. It takes time to find one's feet in the Library, with its strange twists of space and time. She'll meet the new person eventually; the roses need tending now and besides, the work soothes her. But then she looks up and there he is.

"Hello, sweetie," he says, lingering just out of reach with his hands in his pockets and an apprehensive look on his face. His normal face, his real face, the face he's usually worn with her. His hair falls over his brow and he peers through it, nearly shy.

It's only because she's River Song and she has a reputation to maintain that she manages not to burst into tears or punch him or demand where the hell he's been all this while. She shucks off her gardening gloves and drops them by the side of the garden path, letting the pruning shears fall on top of them.

"Is it that time, then?" she asks. "You've met the astronaut?"

"Not so impossible after all," he says with that wry smile.

She tilts her head and looks at him, brimming with too many words to know which ones to say first. She takes a step forward and he opens his arms and meets her halfway, just as he always has done.

"River," he murmurs into her hair.

" _My_ Doctor," she affirms. "I am so sorry."

"Shhh, love," he says. "Water under the bridge. Anyway. I'm sorry as well."

She looks into his eyes, those beautiful ancient eyes.

And then, because in this strange world, she thinks it and it happens, they're in bed together, exploring the beloved expanses of each other's skin. He undresses her slowly, tracing each of her scars with his fingertips and his lips. She shivers under his fingers. _Her_ Doctor, who knows her inside and out. He's memorized these scars; he reads them as easily as he would her journal, taking meaning from swirl and ridge.

"I thought you'd leave these behind," he says, touching the place on her shoulder where a Cyberman's bullet grazed her.

She shrugs, slowly and luxuriously, blissful at his touch. "They're a part of me. The Library doesn't edit; it just reconstructs. I wouldn't have given them up in any case. I earned each and every one of them. They're as much a part of me and my history as you are, my love."

"But they're reminders of bad times," he says.

"Some of us want to remember those times too," she says. "The big bangs and the big nothings."

"And who would have guessed you for a sentimental fool?" he teases her, stroking her hip where she has a scar from an adventure without him: the Sontarans may look stupid, but they're not bad in a fight, unfortunately for her. There's no sensation in the skin there. She arches into his hand anyway, the absence of feeling as poignant as the feeling.

"Yes, well," she says. "Everyone knows my name, and no one knows yours. Everyone knows you're a sentimental fool, and no one knows that I am. We complement each other."

"In so many ways," he says with a twinkle in his eyes as he slides down her body to kiss the puckered skin on her hip. She can't even feel the warmth of his lips except at the edges of the scar, and it's driving her mad. Somehow it makes it even more appealing that he's touching her scar: violence mixed with lust, history mixed with love.

"You have no idea," he says in a rough whisper, his breath puffing against the bare curve of her hip. "I shouldn't find this sexy, that you have all these scars. All those lives taken, all that posturing and bravado. I shudder to think of the things you're capable of. But I've always liked that about you. Somehow being bad makes it better. I like you when you're dangerous, River Song."

"You're no angel yourself," she reminds him, knotting her fingers in his hair.

"Then it makes sense that I love a bad girl," he says and dips to kiss her scar again.

"You're quite the curiosity," she says and then gasps, because his long fingers are stroking her folds as his tongue explores her scar. The fact that she can only feel the hot velvety roughness of his tongue makes her want to squirm and shout with frustration, but she's used to playing by his rules. If she moves, he'll win, and oh, she wants to win, even though it's been so long that she's not sure she won't die again at how exquisite the friction of his skin against hers feels. It's too much, like the burn of lukewarm water the time she got frostbite on one of the ice planets and he had to chafe the life back into her skin. A touch she can barely feel is sending her up like a conflagration, like a fire that will devour and cleanse her. His fingertips ghost against the crease of her thigh and she bites her lip to keep from screaming. He won't break her yet.

How is it that he loves her so much? How is it that he treasures even her flaws? What brought him to the library, in the end? Her younger self? She has written their story on her body in ink and the livid tissue of her scars. Of course he would want to read the chapters he wasn't in, decode the language of her body and the tales she hasn't told them. Insatiable curiosity has always been one of his best and worst characteristics, as now when he caresses her with one finger, exploring her folds and finding the places that make her twist under him. His lean weight pins her to the bed and she relishes every bit of it. Around her scar, his mouth is hot, and then suddenly he lifts his head and she almost moans at the chill.

"My River," he says possessively, looking at her over the curve of her hip. He's still touching her with one hand, flicking at her clit half-idly as if he's forgotten that he's seducing her. His other hand traces the edges of the scar. "Who gave you this souvenir? I don't remember this one."

"You wouldn't," she says, longing for his mouth. "That came from a little soirée with the Sontarans. You wouldn't believe how an hors d'oeuvre can burn when it's served with a side of microexplosives. I should have known better."

"And this one?" He rolls her onto her stomach, his hand still between her legs. She rolls her hips helplessly against his palm as his fingers slide into her. "This one?" He touches his lips to another of her scars, and another as his hands move against her, undoing the loneliness of all the moments they were apart.

"Cybermen," she says, "and stupidity. I got distracted. You're not the only pretty face in the universe."

"So I've been told," he says. "This one?"

"Vastra and Jenny and I were hunting murderers in the London sewers," she tells him. "Nasty creatures haunting those shadows, believe you me."

When he remembers the history of a mark, he tells her the story, brushing his cheek over her skin. He lingers over each unfamiliar scar and scrape, as if he's kissing her better. Absurd notion, but so are most of his ideas. Eventually he moves back to the scar on her hip. His fingers thrust slowly into her as he nuzzles at the boundaries of the shiny skin, nipping at the place where her hip bone pushes against muscle. She will never again be able to graze her scars with her fingers, she thinks, without remembering this helpless, poignant, perfect seduction and her hapless, ruthless, loving Doctor.

"My mercenary," he whispers. "Tell me a story."

He twists his fingers gently inside her and she comes apart at the seams. She's a patchwork woman, made up out of a hundred different moments, stitched together by sinew and scars. He holds her down, his mouth still pressed against her hip, his arm braced against her thighs.

"Never leave me," she says, a moment of weakness as she is still putting herself back together, given context by his long body against hers, his arms around her.

"I never will," he promises. "This isn't the end of our story."

"Well, then it's good that we're in a Library, isn't it," she murmurs, exhausted.

"No rest for the wicked," he says, stroking her hair away from her face.

"Don't worry your pretty head," she says, easing herself on top of him. "You'll tell me everything. We've only got eternity, after all."

He beams up at her and the light in his eyes is like the glow of the soul of the TARDIS, the blissful gold luminescence of time itself. Well, they've got time now, the way they've never had, and a hundred thousand stories left to tell, and even more to write. They'll dream universes into existence, she and the Doctor. They'll leave their mark on this place, oh yes, the way life has left its marks on them. Doctor Song and the Doctor, rewriting things again. She thinks she'll start with, "And they all lived happily ever after."


End file.
